Hi, I’ve been wanting to make a game for a while just as a hobby and have watched some u34 tutorials but not really actually tried to do anything. I think I’m finally ready to get my feet wet, but I don’t know which version of unreal I’d be best served by splashing around in. I’m going to be attempting to make a colony sim/turn based tactics/life sim hybrid if that matters.
Neither.
Use any engine that actually works and isn’t just a pile up of unfinished things.
What matters more than the genre of the game is how long you expect to work on it. The UE4 branch is more stable than UE5, of course, and probably will be for at least a year. I think we can expect some growing pains even after the first official UE5 release early next year.
“Splashing around in” is probably best done in UE4 right now, if only because most tutorials deal with that version than 5.0. If you decide to stick with it, there’s nothing stopping you from migrating to UE5 later.
You can use any. Novice or not - it doesn’t matter. They practically have the same user interface.
The things to consider is that Unreal Engine 5 has more features, but it is not fully released and is in beta, so I can not recommend it for production yet.